Did Planck, Einstein, and Bose count indivisible photons or discrete emission/absorption processes in a black-body cavity?

Abstract

Planck, Einstein and Bose all had to introduce statistics, and thus counting , in order to successfully derive an equation for the energy distribution within the black-body radiation spectrum, and what we now call Bose-Einstein statistics. Some of the details involved in the counting procedure vary while still giving the same result. However, the interpretation of what we count may differ dramatically from one another (as, for example, between Planck and Bose), without impacting the final, mathematical result. We demonstrate here a further alternative, which varies both, in the details of the counting, as well as in the interpretation, while still producing the same well known statistics. This approach puts the quantumness back into the radiation emission/absorption process, possibly dispensing with the requirement of quantized light, at least in the context of black-body radiation.